Cable Containment in the DataCenter

There are many types of cable pathway or containment methods and products available:

Tray or basket – These are generally the most cost effective and may provide the best solution in a collocation center where cabling change-outs and upgrades are common.

Raceways – These provide the best cable protection and partitioned pathway systems allow for both high and low voltage cable to be co-routed, achieving high levels of systems integration

Hooks, straps, lashing are not recommended, although hook and loop straps are useful for cord management, as these types of containment do not offer adequate support for high speed data cabling.

The high density of server and switching equipment results in a large amount of individual cables terminating in each Server Area and this may also happen at the Main Distribution Area – MDA. Pathways must be designed to accommodate this allowing for logical flow into the cross-connect fields, enough separation between different Server Zone cables to allow some degree of independent maintenance and upgrade and separation of fiber and copper runs and copper runs of different types such as CAT6A and lower specification BAS and Data/Voice cables.